Full Frontal 2011 notes
Full Frontal is organised by my co-author, Remy Sharp and his wife Julie (who both juggled recent parenthood with conference running – respect!). I’ve been unable to attend in previous years due to being out of the country but was looking forward to this one, even though I was a little worried that the JavaScript content would be well over my head.
I needn’t have been too scared. The first talk was on CoffeeScript which seemed to me quite intriguing as it (seems to) encourage you to continue thinking of JS as JS (rather than turning it into Java or some such horror) but smooths away some of the syntactical gotchas that get on my moobs. (See Mike Davis’ write-up.) However, I’m a great believer in not cheating until you know the rules properly, so I’ll be delaying CoffeeScript until I’m more confident in my JS.
The second talk was Phil Hawksworth “Excessive Enhancement – Are we taking proper care of the Web?”, which wittily harangued developers to ensure there is proper semantics underneath the JS shizzle and CSS bling – a subject dear to my heart recently. (And he even quoted me, which is nice!)
I skipped talk #3 “Respectable code-editing in the browser” for some synergy-leveraging as I thought it would be too advanced for me. Only afterwards did I realise that the talk was by Marijn Haverbeke, the author of Eloquent JavaScript that I was greatly enjoying on the train coming down on the recommendation of Noo Yoik JS lovegod Mike Taylor.
The talk on Cloud9 IDE by Rik Arends was a bit of a product pitch, but interesting. I wonder if it works across all browsers?
“Scalable JavaScript Application Architecture” by Nicholas Zakas was the tech highlight for me. He discussed a method of structuring an application so that everything was controlled by a main control app with messages passed into it and back out, with everything else being a black box to everything else. This means the programmer must spend a lot of time at the start of the project, designing the sandbox, controller and APIs. This may not be revelatory to most JS coders (or it may be, I don’t know) but it reminded me of learning Jackson Structured Programming in the late 80s when a systems analyst at AT&T. I’d like to see Zakas do a follow-up talk on how to design the sandbox and controller.
Glenn Jones’ “Beyond the Page” talk discussed – and demoed – techniques and emerging standards/ idioms to make Web sites less separated from other apps. We saw Drag and Drop, Web Intents etc. Some evil hackery, too!
Brendan Dawes always scrubs up nice and today was no exception. Although he’s a quivering Flash-lovin’ aesthete (albeit with a Northern accent), he had the techy crowd warming to him and then in stitches with a stream-of-consciousness talk about creativity, new interfaces and expensive pencils.
Last on was Marcin Wichary from Google, who talked of Google Doodles. Who knews that they user-test them? It was a fascinating talk and the good news is that he’ll be blogging about them in the future.
FullFrontal was a super day. The after party had lavish quantities of free grog. The venue was quirky and fun, with free coffee all day. Each talk was handpicked – in fact, everything about the event was curated by Remy and Julie. I’ll be going next year (although not staying in the Travelodge, Preston Road, which was a dump, and nothing to do with the event).
Buy "Calling For The Moon", my debut album of songs I wrote while living in Thailand, India, Turkey. (Only £2, on Bandcamp.)
2 Responses to “ Full Frontal 2011 notes ”
Hey Bruce, I stayed at http://umihotelbrighton.co.uk/. Was really nice, and price wasn’t *too* bad!
I never realised you were still learning js, sorry if my drunken rants were too much! Was really great to meet you!
Sounds awesome, will definately be attending next time.